On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would "make $8 billion available for one-time payments to American farmers this harvest season to provide relief during temporary market disruptions and increased input costs."

Using a formula derived from the USDA's production, yield, and price estimates, the Harvest Fuel Relief program will "provide simple, proportional support to producers." It will only cover a "portion of modeled losses during the 2026 crop year." The Farm Service Agency—an office within the USDA that administers credit and loan programs—will administer the $8 billion in one-time payments using funds from the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federal entity authorized to draw up to $30 billion from the U.S. Treasury to fund agricultural initiatives. Payment rates won't be released until November, and the USDA's notice leaves open the possibility of additional payments for "non-Title I commodities, including specialty crop growers and fishermen."

A fiscally questionable decision, the program comes at a time when farmers are feeling a significant price pinch. The dyed diesel American farmers and ranchers use is exempt from state and federal highway taxes, but that has done little to offset skyrocketing fuel prices. In September, the American Farm Bureau Federation projected that fuel expenses would reach $22 billion this year, up 29 percent from 2025. The Farm Bureau estimates that total production expenses will reach nearly $500 billion in 2026. According to its own predictions, the USDA doesn't expect the situation to improve anytime soon.

In its latest Commodity Costs and Returns report, released in June, the USDA projects farmers and ranchers will face record production costs in 2027—higher than during the COVID-19 supply chain disruptions—driven by higher prices for necessary inputs such as fuel, fertilizer, seeds, machinery, and labor. 

While the USDA has blamed "temporary market disruptions" for these cost hikes, the blame more accurately falls to President Donald Trump, thanks to his illegal war in Iran. As of Tuesday, Trump's war—and the subsequent shocks it has caused to the global diesel supply—have pushed the national average price in the U.S. up $2.70 per gallon from a year ago, a 74.6 percent increase, according to AAA data.

Unfortunately, the war in Iran is just one of several Trump administration policies making life more expensive for everyone, including the nation's farmers and ranchers. Tariffs on imported fertilizer, which began in 2020 during the first Trump administration, have made it difficult for American farmers to afford what they need. By the Farm Bureau's estimates, fertilizer costs for 2026 are projected to reach a record $40 billion, up 15 percent from the previous year.

The $8 billion program is part of a windfall of taxpayer money the Trump administration has sent to farmers as relief for harms caused by the president's actions. Last December, the USDA sent $11 billion in one-time bridge payments to more than half a million farmers nationwide. Earlier this month, the USDA announced it would provide a record $13.8 billion in gross payments to agricultural producers to cover revenue losses. 

In a speech in Kansas touting the program, Trump claimed that the state's residents would see a "plunge" in prices once the war ends. That's likely an exaggeration, given the host of questionable economic policies he seems hell-bent on implementing. 

Still, that shouldn't discredit the president's suggestion. Ending the war would benefit farmers, ranchers, and consumers, without doling out billions in another government bailout for a favored industry.

The post Trump's $8 Billion Diesel Bailout Pays Farmers for a Problem He Created appeared first on Reason Magazine.

On October 14, tens of thousands of Colombians took to the streets to protest against the government of far-right leader Abelardo de la Espriella, who has been in office for just two months.

The protests demonstrated the opposition’s clear ability to mobilize its base and fill the streets of several Colombian cities, even though the new government is still in its early days.

Protesters – including members of labor unions, Indigenous organizations, opposition parties, and students – marched through the streets of the capital, Bogotá, as well as other major cities across the country, such as Cali, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Riohacha, and Pereira.

In an address to the nation, De la Espriella stated that 98% of the protests were peaceful, though he also warned the demonstrators: “From the very first day of my administration, I have issued a directive that leaves no room for interpretation: peaceful protest is respected, protected, and guaranteed. But violence, vandalism, and any attempt to violate the rights of others will have no place under my administration.”

He also added: “Here there is a state, here there is authority, and here there is a government that respects freedoms, enforces the law, and protects the millions of Colombians who get up early every day to work and build our nation.”

Criticism

The main criticisms leveled against the government focused on the executive branch’s neoliberal agenda and its security policy. According to the protesters, De la Espriella is failing to address the difficult labor, educational, economic, and territorial conditions faced by Colombians; on the contrary, his political agenda is making these circumstances worse.

Specifically, the protesters complained about cuts and adjustments to the budgets of public institutions, the lack of greater public investment in education, and the fear among several indigenous organizations that the government’s new measures will prevent them from freely exercising their right to protest.

In fact, one of the main catalysts for the protests has been the signing of a presidential decree that empowers state agents to intervene more directly against protesters – a move that has been criticized, according to the protesters, for its anti-democratic intent.

On this point, social organizations, such as the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council assert that, fearing a popular backlash like the one Iván Duque faced (which turned into what some called a “rebellion” by young people that lasted several weeks in 2021), De la Espriella signed Decree 1525, which modifies law enforcement protocols to give state forces greater leeway when dealing with protesters.

Among other measures, law enforcement can now take direct action in response to protests without the need for exhaustive dialogue, as previously required by the regulation. Several human rights organizations have expressed concern about the decree, stating that it could increase the risk of abuses and reduce mediation as the primary course of action, which already was barely used. During the 2021 national strike in Colombia, 46 people were killed in the context of the heavy police repression of the strike.

One of the people attending the demonstrations last week was former President Gustavo Petro, who optimistically stated that the protests reflect a popular response to the executive branch’s decisions: “The people can organize themselves, and two months into the start of a tyrannical and imposed government, this is the best wake-up call. The time has come for a Latin American day of popular mobilization.”

Petro, who has just resumed leadership of the Pacto Histórico – a coalition of movements that supported his political project – also said: “This is how we respond to adversity with dignity, with the determination to win again, without fear. Life is our companion, not death. The people won’t give up, damn it.”

On Monday, a group of students from the University of Chicago stood outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—one of the world's largest and most diverse derivatives marketplaces—and called for the repeal of an obscure 1958 law that bans onions as futures products traded on U.S. exchanges. 

Attracting an audience with a humorous jingle and amusing signs that included "Onions Deserve a Future," "Honk If You Want Free Onions," "Hot Girls Hedge Onions," and "Free Markets Feed Families," the student group, named For Our Futures, has a simple platform: a repeal of the 1958 Onion Futures Act, which prohibits anyone from trading in onion futures on commodity exchanges. (The law was amended in 2010 to ban motion picture box office receipts from being traded on commodity exchanges.) The viral campaign drew enough attention that Mike Selig—chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a proponent of expanding the list of commodities traded on futures markets—was asked about the law in a media appearance. 

American farmers produce about 6.75 billion pounds of onions a year, according to the National Onion Association, an industry trade group. While peers who grow cotton, wheat, corn, and soybeans can hedge against price swings by trading futures contracts, onion farmers have no such recourse under federal law. But, as the Agriculture Department's daily National Potato and Onion Report shows, onion prices are highly volatile and subject to wild swings, making them an ideal market for futures trading. 

In its latest report, released Monday, the agency shows that onion prices have roughly doubled since this time last year. If onion futures contracts were legal, farmers could rely on market expectations instead of planting crops based on last year's prices. It would also let buyers potentially cut costs by locking in lower prices to protect against spikes. Trading onion futures contracts would give the industry a useful price-discovery tool, one that the student group aptly notes is "crucial for price stability and for hedging risks associated with weather and market fluctuations."

It's not For Our Futures' first time trying this gambit. The student group staged similar protests at college campuses in April and May, armed with bags of raw onions to entice passersby into signing their petition to legalize onion futures. The students' crusade might be comical, but after a recent Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans age 18–34 have a positive image of socialism, it's encouraging to see college-age students stand up for free markets.

A protest over onions sounds absurd, but it's a viral reminder to others in that age cohort of how far governments can go when given the slightest leeway to regulate an industry.

Instead of relying on outdated price points when planning future harvests, American onion producers could use resources like futures contracts that offer real-time market signals. All that would require—as the college kids state—is for federal lawmakers to "let the free market reign supreme."

The post You Can Trade Contracts on Elections, but Not on Onions. These College Students Want To Fix That. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

As SpaceX impacts Ukraine and AI-generated music divides artists and fans, critics are asking what happens when technology has too much control over our lives

• This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you while sitting in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental Drowning Girl, on view in New York City. Today in tech, we’re discussing the perils of Elon Musk’s one-man global infrastructure, AI-generated music and a Guardian AI conference in Paris.

The Ukrainian leader says talks with US envoys covered security guarantees and he hopes to hear Russia’s response tomorrow

Nordic correspondent

As well as Steve Witkoff, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy will also meet the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre and the Finnish president Alexander Stubb and Norway’s new King Haakon during his visit to Oslo.

Donald Trump loves to put his name on things, and when it comes to the recent burst of inflation, it’s totally deserved. Trump and Republican politicians are doing their best to try to make a simple story complicated. But there is no doubt that Trump is the lead and almost sole author of the inflation […]

The post Trumpflation is here and it’s all Trump’s doing appeared first on Asia Times.

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At a protest against a bill to legalize Waymo in Washington, D.C., earlier in October, the main tagline was: "Robotaxis don't vote; we vote." Little is known about the group behind it, raising questions about who's fueling the pushback against robotaxis in America's major cities.

People First Transportation Alliance (PFTA), the organization in question, describes itself as a "statewide coalition of labor unions" dedicated to putting "people over untested technology." The PFTA states it's a "coalition of community organizations, safe-streets advocates, and faith leaders." However, as The Washington Post reported on Monday, the group appears to have overstated its affiliation with four of the 13 individuals and organizations listed as its founding members.

"Several groups and individuals said statements made about them on the Transportation Alliance website were inaccurate," the Post reported, adding that PFTA "appears to be newly formed, with a minimal social media presence. Its website domain was created in late April, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers." The group created its social media accounts in May, but it has no posts and no followers. 

Apart from its recent interest in the nation's capital, the PFTA lists New York and Philadelphia as its priorities, two cities led by lawmakers who publicly oppose Waymo's presence. Yet for a relatively unknown, recently created organization, the PFTA has found success in its campaign to shut autonomous vehicles like Waymo out of America's Northeast.

In February, the New York Post reported that Gov. Kathy Hochul (D–N.Y.) withdrew her own proposal—which would have allowed commercial robotaxi services such as Waymo to operate in smaller cities in upstate New York—after a PFTA-led coalition prompted enough backlash to kill support for the measure. A Hochul spokesperson told the Post that it was "clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal." 

The PFTA told the Post that the organization would urge the state to "pass legislation requiring a human driver behind the wheel in every vehicle and a comprehensive study leading to a plan to address the impact driverless cars would have on New York State." 

The group's resolution comes despite customer support for autonomous vehicles: A 2025 study on Waymo, Uber, and Lyft by Obi—a company that aggregates real-time rideshare prices—found that 70 percent of riders who've used Waymo preferred it over Lyft or Uber and 42.7 percent of all respondents were willing to pay Waymo's premium price (up to $10 more) to use the service.

Despite consumer support, autonomous vehicles can't count on a fair shake from lawmakers in some of the country's largest cities. In New York City, Waymo's permit to operate a pilot program on public streets expired in March. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has so far been noncommittal on renewing the company's permit. At a press conference that same month, he said his administration would be prioritizing workers such as the city's taxi drivers who "for far too long, have been sold a dream of being able to work their way to the middle class, only to have the rug pulled out from under them." 

Despite the mystery surrounding the PFTA, its D.C. protest drew enough public support to elicit a statement from a person who will likely be the city's next mayor, current D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. In a post on X, Lewis George said D.C. was "facing a jobs crisis" that would be exacerbated by "rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles." She urged the D.C. Council—which is currently considering a punitive proposal to legalize commercial autonomous vehicles—to "get this right and not rush Waymo legislation this year."

It's unclear how much longer Lewis George wants the District's residents to wait before autonomous vehicles are available for use. D.C.'s approach to legalizing commercial robotaxis hardly seems rushed. 

Waymo began testing its vehicles in the city nearly two and a half years ago, in spring 2024. The company's co-CEO Tekedra N. Mawakana said its fleet has driven "more than 300,000 miles in Washington, D.C."Meanwhile, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) has been conducting studies and organizing working groups on autonomous vehicles for nearly a decade. Still, the agency has been unable to draft a regulatory framework that would eventually enable commercial robotaxi use in the nation's capital. In March, UrbanTurf reported that DDOT would be conducting a long-awaited study on autonomous vehicles—originally due in 2022—and "expects to propose recommendations on AV deployment later this year."

Opponents of autonomous vehicles, such as Lewis George and the PFTA, often cite job loss as a reason not to legalize the tech. Still, with only 200 full-time ride-share drivers in a city of roughly 400,000 workers, as Lewis George has reportedly stated, the situation is a far cry from a crisis.

As for PFTA's public safety claims, Waymo's independently reviewed data show that, compared with an average human driver over the same distance, its vehicles caused 95 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 93 percent fewer pedestrian crashes with serious injuries.

PFTA claims it represents the people most directly affected by transportation policy. The little publicly available information suggests the group is more focused on protecting its members' position in the ride-share market than enhancing the experience of riders, who are increasingly opting for robotaxis when given the opportunity.

The post A Months-Old Anti-Robotaxi Group Is Steering Transportation Policy From Albany to D.C. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Recent media reports projecting South Korea’s per capita GDP to surpass Japan’s have generated considerable excitement across the regional countries that see Korea as a role model. According to the IMF’s October 2026 projections, South Korea’s nominal GDP per capita could reach approximately $49,000 in 2027, compared with Japan’s $37,000-38,000. Its achievements in semiconductors, advanced […]

The post South Korea: A growing national crisis and a strategic warning appeared first on Asia Times.

The world’s first supersonic passenger airliner—the Soviet Tu-144—may have become history after a brief but troubled stint that ended in commercial failure. However, some Russian volunteers refuse to let it vanish into oblivion and are reportedly advancing efforts to restore the aircraft for static display.

At the height of the Cold War, the Tu-144 “Concordski” was seen as an answer to the Anglo-French supersonic aircraft, Concorde.

The Russian airliner beat the Concorde in the skies twice: first with its maiden flight on December 31, 1968, two months before Concorde, and second with its first supersonic flight in June 1969, about four months before Concorde.

To preserve this legacy, a group of Russian volunteers has spent years coaxing life back into a Tu-144 airframe on the shared grounds of the Gromov Flight Research Institute and Zhukovsky Airport.

Interestingly, though, these volunteers are neither engineers from Russia’s state design bureau nor museum-paid technicians, but enthusiasts with limited resources aiming to restore a retired Tupolev Tu-144D. 

The aircraft, registered CCCP-77115, is parked on the shared grounds of the Gromov Flight Research Institute and Zhukovsky Airport outside Moscow. It served as a static exhibit at the MAKS air show for several years, but its fate remains unclear, as the air show has been suspended since 2021 due to the war in Ukraine.

Passionate volunteers have carried out extensive external and internal restoration work on the aircraft. One volunteer involved, Pavel Efter, has posted videos of the work on both airplanes on his YouTube channel, “Restorer144,” since 2023.

In the videos, volunteers can be seen turning on the electrical power supply and batteries, testing the fuel gauge, fuel pump, and fuel pressure indicator in the cockpit, checking the landing gear lights and inflating the tires, testing the cabin lighting, repairing the analog navigation system, examining the electrical schematics, cleaning the outside of the aircraft, inspecting the SSP-2A fire detection system and smoke sensors, raising and lowering the nose, testing the retractable canards, testing the APU’s bay doors beneath the aircraft, and actually installing the TA-6A Auxiliary Power Unit (APU).

In Instagram comments, Efter told enthusiasts and followers that the Tu-144D is being refurbished only for static exhibition and will not return to flight.

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Notably, the TA-6A and other mechanical and electrical modifications to the Tu-144D (as seen in the video above) have recently been made, sparking rumors that the volunteers may be preparing the aircraft for another static exhibition at MAKS, probably in 2027.

Nonetheless, the volunteers have been working on restoring the aircraft for several months. In July 2026, media reports noted that the volunteers had already started the electrical system and connected a ground power source, adding that even the well-known nose-lowering mechanism had become operational.

Another Russian state-funded news website, Mir24, provided more details on the volunteers. “There is a problem with such glass fuses now. They aren’t used anywhere; you can’t always find them in old stock. We throw out a cry on the Internet: who has something, who can help with what,” Sergey Chechetkin told the publication at the time. Sergey is a former aviation engineer who devotes all his free time to the Tu-144.

The report also noted that volunteers have completely recreated the plane’s cabin. Volunteers collected the missing devices from across the country and began restoring the aircraft by tidying the service panels and lamps and installing the original chairs. Initially, the 77115 board wasn’t a passenger deck; it served as an experimental testbed. “We find it in different places. Old blocks are transmitted at the bases; you can find something here. Here we are installing the blocks on the mounts,” a volunteer named Alexey told Mir24.

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The project carries no grand political statement. The volunteers do not frame their work as resistance or protest. Instead, they speak of history. “This is not just a museum exhibit, but a legend that we should be proud of. You can still learn a lot from it; many developments aren’t available on other planes yet. It is still ahead of its time,” said Alexey Amelushkin, an engineer at the training and methodological center of PJSC Tupolev, earlier. 

Needless to say, returning this legendary airframe to flight is widely regarded as impractical, especially since Kolesov RD-36-51 engines are long out of production, spare parts are scarce, and certification requirements would be formidable.

Therefore, Efter and his colleagues are only restoring the aircraft’s ability to present itself: nose down in the classic pose, canards extended, cabin lights on, systems powered by its own APU.

First Into The Air, But Not The First To Succeed

The Tupolev Tu-144 was the world’s first supersonic passenger airliner.

Designed by the Tupolev Design Bureau, the aircraft was rushed into development after the then-Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, demanded a supersonic transport that would fly before its Western counterpart.

The prototype made its maiden flight on 31 December 1968 near Moscow, beating Concorde into the air by more than two months. Subsequently, the aircraft went supersonic for the first time in June 1969 and became the first commercial aircraft to reach Mach 2 in May 1970.

The Tu-144 was built to be larger and faster than Concorde, and featured a distinctive double-delta wing and a drooping nose for better landing visibility. Later models also added retractable canards to improve low-speed handling.

However, Western experts and officials claimed the Soviets stole the Concorde plans, which may have helped them build the Tupolev Tu-144 before the Concorde.

These claims reportedly stemmed (at least in part) from the uncanny design similarities between the world’s first two supersonic passenger aircraft.

Despite its early successes over the Concorde, the airplane faced technical issues.

For example, Tu-144’s early Kuznetsov NK-144 engines required constant afterburner use to sustain supersonic cruise, making it extremely noisy, fuel-thirsty, and shorter-range than Concorde, which could supercruise without afterburners. Moreover, reliability problems emerged during testing and maintenance, and the cabin was very noisy and vibrated a lot.

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On June 3, 1973, during a demonstration flight at the Paris Air Show, a production Tu-144 broke apart in midair and crashed into the French village of Goussainville, killing all six crew members along with eight additional people on the ground.

Although the most widely accepted explanation is that the crew overstressed the airframe during fast maneuvers, the precise cause of this disaster remains uncertain.

The Tu-144 entered limited commercial service with Aeroflot in 1975, initially carrying mail and cargo on the Moscow–Almaty route, followed by passenger flights in Nov 1977.

However, the aircraft flew only about 55 passenger services before a second major incident. In May 1978, a fuel-line rupture and fire during a test flight claimed the lives of two crew members and formally ended passenger operations.

After this debacle, the aircraft continued brief cargo and experimental work even as its rival program—the Concorde—struggled with its own set of issues.

Both programs were eventually canceled because of poor safety records and concerns about economic viability. However, Concorde was far more successful than the Tu-144 and wasn’t discontinued until 2003.

The Soviet Union, for its part, built only 16 airframes before operations ceased in 1983. A few surviving examples later trained pilots for the Soviet Buran space shuttle, and one modified aircraft served as a flying laboratory in a joint NASA–Russian research program from 1996 to 1999, conducting its final flights in support of future supersonic transport studies, as earlier explained in detail by the EurAsian Times. 

Though neither the Tu-144 nor the Concorde survived, both programs have inspired people worldwide to make supersonic commercial travel a reality. Earlier this year, United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) CEO Vadim Badekha confirmed that the Zhukovsky National Research Center is working on a supersonic airliner prototype. He said the effort had moved beyond paper studies into “hardware,” with UAC providing active support, and expressed confidence that the center would complete the work.

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“Yes, such work is underway at the Zhukovsky Research Center, and we are actively assisting. The work is no longer confined to paper – it is already being carried out in hardware. A prototype of such an aircraft is under development, and we believe the Zhukovsky Research Center will successfully complete this work,” he told TASS.

Meanwhile, NASA is advancing work on the X-59, an experimental aircraft in the agency’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (Quesst) program that could go supersonic without generating a sonic boom or a loud, thunder-like sound when it exceeds the speed of sound.  In addition, China is developing a supersonic passenger aircraft that could make its maiden flight by 2027. Last year, reports noted that the Chinese commercial aerospace company leading the project conducted the first test flight of a detonation ramjet engine. 

As for the Tu-144, this aircraft is remembered as a bold but ultimately unsuccessful engineering achievement. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the volunteers outside the state machinery of Russia are doing everything they can to ensure that the supersonic airliner does not get lost in pages of history.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
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The post Russia’s ‘Concorde’ is Back: World’s 1st Supersonic Passenger Airliner Lives On as Volunteers Fix Tu-144 appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

This live blog is now closed.

• Macron criticises ‘unbridled violence’ after 2,400 arrests across France

French PM Lecornu says he has asked prefects to implement “a number of partial curfews” in certain “localised” urban areas to stop further disorder, which he attributes to “the extreme-left” and some criminal elements.

We will no doubt hear more on this from local authorities, as in the example of Marseille (10:32).

The “forced digital detox” delivered by Ukraine’s Armed Forces has hit the most profitable part of Yandex’s business: search and AI. The long-term fallout from the attacks on the company’s data centers has yet to be assessed, but supercomputing experts consulted by T-invariant are confident that all three of its supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin — were badly damaged by fire and smoke. Soot and ash may have reached the machines’ microelectronics through their direct free-cooling systems, which use outside air. In the best case, cleaning them will take many months; in the worst, Yandex will have to buy new, extremely scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents, which will take years. The company owns Russia’s best supercomputers, which, according to its financial reports, had recently become key drivers of its growth. On the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the global Top500 list of supercomputers, competing with leading systems from the US, China, Japan, and Germany. After the Ukrainian drone strikes, Russia risks falling behind Kazakhstan in the performance of its top supercomputers as early as November.

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.

All three of Yandex’s supercomputers have been knocked out of service indefinitely by drone strikes on the company’s data centers. The first attack came overnight on October 8 in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. That site houses Chervonenkis, the IT giant’s flagship machine and the most powerful of Russia’s publicly listed supercomputers, as well as Lyapunov, the third most powerful. The following night, Ukrainian forces struck the data center in Kaluga — Yandex’s largest and one of the biggest in Russia. Overnight on October 11, a data center in Vladimir, home to the Galushkin supercomputer, came under attack.

Four specialists interviewed by T-invariant are confident that the company’s computing capacity has suffered serious damage. In their view, the main reason the equipment was so vulnerable to the drone strikes and the fires that followed is the direct free-cooling system, which cools the equipment with outside air (supply fans push the air through filters, and it then flows through the server racks).

Even if the fire didn’t spread to the supercomputer racks directly, air laden with soot and ash could have reached the server boards, and the finest particles could have settled on the board substrate (a lot also depends on the condition of the filters). Carbon conducts electricity. Because the traces on the boards are packed so densely, these particles can act as conductive “bridges” between contacts, causing widespread short circuits and burning out motherboards. What’s more, combustion byproducts can corrode conductors and contact joints.

Photo: Andriy Kovalenko’s Telegram channel

In the summer of 2026, Yandex announced that it was starting to roll out liquid cooling. “To integrate the technology into existing data centers that operate on free-cooling principles, the company’s engineers developed a specialized solution: sidecars. The sidecars are additional racks fitted with liquid-to-air radiators. They make it possible to introduce liquid cooling without large-scale, costly renovation of the buildings. The hybrid of air and liquid systems provides efficient thermal management for high-load racks and speeds up the adaptation of the infrastructure to the needs of internal services and external partners,” the company said. However, according to the experts interviewed by T-invariant, although liquid-cooled components fare better in a fire, the company is unlikely to have finished this retrofit at all of its data centers.

One of the experts, who works at a global AI tech giant, was skeptical of the technology Yandex uses to cool its supercomputers. “Nobody in their right mind has used free cooling for ages,” the source told T-invariant. Most operators rely on liquid cooling systems (which is what NVIDIA uses), and, less often, on immersion cooling.

According to the specialists, cleaning smoke, soot, and grime off the supercomputers’ components could take up to six months. And if parts need to be replaced — including expensive and, above all, scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents — getting the machines fully back up and running could take one to two years.

Up-to-date videos on science during wartime, interviews, podcasts, and streams with prominent scientists — subscribe to the T-invariant YouTube channel!

Yandex has not commented on the condition of its supercomputers after the attacks. T-invariant asked leading Russian supercomputing specialists — both those working in Russia and those who left to work for global AI giants — for a detailed assessment of the situation and of all the threats and challenges facing Yandex (all of them asked to remain anonymous).

Why the Fate of the Supercomputers Matters Most

The strike on Russia’s IT leader had a digital blast radius far beyond its data centers. For more than a week now, Russian users have been dealing with outages in services run by Yandex’s many cloud customers and other B2B clients. They have also been hit by outages in Yandex’s own services — above all, Yandex Disk and Yandex Pay. The Russian internet is flooded with videos from users who have lost access, possibly only temporarily, to their data or their money.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

How Many B2B Clients Depend on Yandex’s Services

According to the company’s financial results for Q2 2026, Yandex Cloud’s total client base grew to 64,000. AI and information security services remain the key growth drivers: they are already used by 37% and 53% of large clients, respectively — up 10 and 9 percentage points from a year earlier. Consumption of commercial tokens via the API on the Yandex AI Studio platform reached 398 billion tokens in Q2 2026 — double the figure for the first quarter and 70% more than in all of 2025. Yandex 360, the company’s cloud office suite, keeps growing: it now has more than 117 million users and 185,000 organizations. At the end of Q2 2026, Yandex 360 had a total of 8.9 million paid accounts, 2.4 million of them at large companies.

Yet the main problem for Yandex itself after Ukraine’s strikes on its data centers is the partial or total loss of computing capacity. And there are at least two reasons why. Yes, the disabled data centers will weigh on Yandex’s market capitalization, but something else matters more: these problems could stall the development of its AI, on which the company’s core business depends, for months or even years.

After the first drone strikes on Yandex’s data centers on October 8 and 9, many investors remained cautiously optimistic about the company: the cloud accounts for only a small share of revenue, and workloads can be redistributed among data centers. The share price dipped by a few percent at the time. The third attack, and the likelihood of further Ukrainian drone raids, made financial forecasts gloomier.

Yandex does not break out AI figures in its financial reports, so one has to go by the Search and AI Services segment. It has the highest adjusted EBITDA margin of all the segments Yandex reports. In Q2 2026, that margin was 46.3%, and for the first half of the year, 44.8% (by comparison, the City Services segment had a margin of 16%, and the contribution of the entire B2B segment, including Yandex Cloud, is far smaller than that of search and AI). The Search and AI Services segment also generated the largest adjusted EBITDA in absolute terms.

The reports also show that AI is already making a measurable contribution to advertising revenue growth: according to the company, its ARGUS recommendation technology accounted for almost half of that growth in Q2 2026. And although Yandex doesn’t disclose the profitability of its AI products separately, its reports make clear just how important AI is to the company’s financial health.

“Yandex remains one of the world’s first companies to expand its experiments with AI-based promotion formats for businesses — in Alice AI, both within Yandex Search and on its own website and app. These formats take a fundamentally new approach to audience targeting. The algorithms take into account not only the query but the entire context of the conversation with Alice AI. This makes it possible to identify a user’s potential interest even before they formulate a specific query. Promotion on AI surfaces is already showing measurable results: the cost of customer acquisition is comparable to that of promotion in Search. In chats with Alice AI, the ad system has already displayed ads from more than 460,000 advertisers — three-quarters of all advertisers on the platform. Alice AI remains the most popular AI assistant among Russians. In the second quarter, the number of weekly users who turn to Alice AI for tasks and conversation grew 39% quarter over quarter to 33.2 million. The number of monthly active Stations with Alice [Yandex’s smart speakers — T-invariant] rose 31% year over year to 22.5 million. More and more users own multiple devices: the number of people who own two or more Stations grew 44% to 4.7 million,” Yandex’s report states.

Clearly, the main risk concerns AI. It is these three supercomputers at two data centers that power the development of the company’s neural networks and other parts of its AI ecosystem. If the computing capacity has to be shut down so the equipment can be cleaned after the fire and smoke, the infrastructure behind almost half of the growth in ad revenue will sit idle for months. If the supercomputers are damaged even partially, development will be set back by years. First, sanctions restrict deliveries of NVIDIA A100 accelerators to Russia. Getting around them is extremely expensive and difficult, as shown by the cloak-and-dagger operation to build MSU-270, a closely guarded supercomputer at Moscow State University (see T-invariant’s investigation). Second, there is a global shortage of cutting-edge NVIDIA chips: orders are booked two to three years in advance, as confirmed by a T-invariant source at NVIDIA and by another specialist at a global AI giant who asked that the company not be named.

As a result, the development of YandexGPT and Alice AI is effectively on hold indefinitely — even as demand for them is growing explosively: according to Yandex B2B Tech data cited by the financial portal Finam, token consumption in Yandex AI Studio grew 18-fold year over year in the first half of 2026. Yandex’s service status page currently lists Yandex AI Studio as unavailable.

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Why Yandex’s Data Centers Weren’t Ready for War

“Yandex built its data centers and its supercomputers in peacetime, for peacetime. Everything was designed for normal life; it never even crossed anyone’s mind that drones would come crashing through the roof. The Ryazan, Kaluga, and Vladimir regions don’t get earthquakes or other natural disasters, so nobody even thought about investing in physical protection for the buildings,” explains one of the supercomputing industry experts T-invariant spoke to.

Yandex’s public descriptions of its infrastructure (in particular, a post the company published in 2020) reveal the logic behind its design: low energy consumption, redundant power, simple and cheap cooling, and the ability to shift workloads between sites.

According to a BBC source, Yandex regularly practiced taking one data center offline and shifting its load to the others. But the successive loss of several large sites was probably never rehearsed. The BBC’s source also says that Yandex’s services may have treated two separate buildings in Vladimir as backups for each other: losing both at once was considered impossible.

“In Russia, data centers are usually built as fairly basic ‘boxes’: no serious walls, no fencing, nothing like that, almost no liquid cooling, no sophisticated fire suppression systems — even though advanced technologies exist, including Russian-made ones. All of that is considered insane capex by Russian business standards. Nobody could afford it. On top of that, there’s the extreme centralization. About 70–80% of all data centers are located around Moscow and St. Petersburg,” explains the supercomputing expert.

The Chervonenkis supercomputer at Yandex’s data center in Sasovo. Photo: Yandex

The first public calls in Russia to improve data center security came literally a couple of days before the first attacks. The BBC cites examples: “One of the main tasks now is how to move computing capacity, how to move all the useful IT load out of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Moscow region somewhere farther away… somewhere beyond the Urals, where, fortunately, things aren’t landing yet,” Deputy Minister of Digital Development Yevgeny Filatov said on October 6 at the Digital Solutions forum. And on the evening of October 7 (a few hours before the first attack), RBC published a report that representatives of the IT industry and the Ministry of Digital Development were discussing the possibility of placing AI data centers in “friendly countries” [the Russian government’s term for countries that have not imposed sanctions on Russia — T-invariant].

The BBC also points out that by then Russian forces had already been striking data centers in Ukraine. From September 23 to 28, they damaged at least six such facilities. The attacks left people without internet access and disrupted TV broadcasts. The Russian Ministry of Defense even posted an image on its social media channels that read “Digital detox… by force.” As early as October 4, two days before Filatov’s remarks, Volodymyr Zelensky warned of retaliatory strikes: “Do they really think we won’t respond?”

Other striking examples — in every sense of the word — emerged in 2026, showing that data centers are among the top-priority targets in wartime. Civilian data centers were also hit by drones and missiles during the conflict between the US and Iran. Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE were attacked several times after Washington launched its bombing campaign against Iran. Amazon advised customers to move their data to sites outside the region, since there was no telling when the facilities would be back online. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) also threatened to completely destroy OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi.

“In Germany, I took a close look at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre near Munich. It’s a windowless cube with a moat around it, so nobody can ram it with a car. The entrance is a small suspension bridge. The cube itself is essentially a building within a building, a Faraday cage [an example of architectural radio-frequency shielding — T-invariant]. So they’ve literally put serious physical and other protective measures in place. And that supercomputer ranked below Yandex’s Chervonenkis on the Top500. Still, the Germans invested very seriously in protection. That kind of protection won’t stop ballistic missiles, but against drones it works just fine. We also know of incredible underground data centers in Norway and Finland. Then there’s Alibaba’s supercomputing center in China. Almost all the Top500 leaders don’t skimp on capex; they install sophisticated liquid or immersion cooling systems. Russia’s IT leaders cut corners on all of it,” the expert explains.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

In Norway, Lefdal Mine Datacenter houses its data halls in a former mine, about 700 meters in from the entrance to the mountain. It combines a sheltered location with cooling by cold fjord water. Some of the supporting infrastructure, including the generators, remains above ground.

The Finnish data center The Rock, located in the Pori area, uses nine tunnel halls originally carved out for military use. The underground facility, covering about 8,500 square meters, combines the natural protection of solid bedrock with segmentation into security zones and specialized engineering infrastructure, including direct liquid cooling.

Who Ultimately Gets the “Forced Digital Detox”

Of Russia’s six largest supercomputers, only the two belonging to the banking giant Sber are located at a site relatively well protected from drone attacks. Christofari and Christofari Neo are housed in Skolkovo, which has better air defense coverage. GROM, the supercomputer owned by the telecom operator MTS, is in Lytkarino, outside Moscow. Yandex’s remaining data centers are also in the Moscow region, in Mytishchi and Ivanteyevka. All of these towns near Moscow regularly come under massive Ukrainian drone raids.

“Restoring supercomputers of this caliber just isn’t going to happen, not now and not anytime soon. And it’s not even about having the money. The main problem isn’t even sanctions, it’s the shortage of chips and other components: there’s a huge waiting list for them worldwide. That said, gray- and black-market imports are very costly, too. So things are pretty Sucksovo these days [a pun on Sasovo, the town where Yandex’s flagship data center was hit, and the Russian slang verb sosat’, ‘to suck’ — T-invariant],” says a supercomputing specialist who spoke with T-invariant.

The next update of the global Top500 list of supercomputers will be published in November. Chervonenkis currently ranks 101st, and Kazakhstan’s Alem.Cloud is 104th (Kazakhstan’s second machine is 122nd, ahead of all of Russia’s other supercomputers). The experts T-invariant spoke to have no doubt that Ukraine’s retaliatory “forced digital detox” will push Russia’s leading supercomputers below Kazakhstan’s on the Top500 as early as this fall. Competing with the US, China, and Japan is out of the question altogether: Russia already lags behind them by two orders of magnitude.

As T-invariant reported earlier, the Netherlands is among the countries ahead of Russia on the Top500 list. Two machines registered to the Netherlands belong to Nebius, the company led by Yandex co-founder and former CEO Arkady Volozh: ISEG (which ranked 16th when it debuted) and ISEG2, with a combined peak performance of about 425 petaflops. According to the government’s Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036, Russia’s five machines on the Top500 together deliver less than 100 petaflops of peak performance. In other words, Arkady Volozh’s company alone has more computing power than all of Russia’s Top500 systems combined.

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The post Bad Air Day: Drone Strikes on Yandex Set to Push Russia Below Kazakhstan in the AI Race appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

In recent days, a Ukrainian drone strike hit Russia’s largest data center, owned by bank and technology company Sberbank. The strike came after Ukraine hit three data centers belonging to the tech giant Yandex, which is often referred to as “Russia’s Google.” After those attacks, Yandex’s traffic dropped 94%. Its users experienced heavy disruption to […]

The post Data centers in the line of fire of Ukraine war appeared first on Asia Times.